In the past, when shipping cartons are opened and loose packing material such as polystyrene "peanuts or popcorn" are used around the objects shipped in the carton, the loose packing material has been removed by hand and tends fall onto worktables or the floor and must be swept up after the cartons are unpacked.
In many companies this packing material is then thrown out with the trash from the receiving department while their shipping department orders new packing material to put in outgoing cartons.
While it would be desirable both from the economic and environmental standpoint to collect the packing from incoming cartons and reuse such packing in outgoing cartons, there has not been any rapid and efficient means of accomplishing this task.
Until the present time the use of vacuums have been impractical since the available vacuums have either had too much suction and would pick up both the packing and the contents of the cartons or the vacuums were not suitable for handling large low density lightweight objects which, due to their bulk, fill the collection bags quite rapidly and may clog some of the intake hoses.
A typical example of a prior art vacuum cleaning apparatus is shown by U.S. Pat. No. 1,559,804 issued to R. P. Sweeny which shows a vacuum cleaner for lint, dust, and light trash in a textile factory. This device has a large trash collection bag and the airflow in the suction tube is induced by a single stream of compressed air injected at an angle into the suction tube. This vacuum device, however, is not capable of selectively picking up particles of certain density but picks up all loose particles in the path of the intake nozzle.
Another prior art device is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,411,388 issued to J. E. Muck. This device, however, is not designed for collecting material particles but for distributing loose insulation drawn from a storage container. It is not designed to selectively gather particles of certain density to separate them from higher density article.